Building a healthy business with Sage 200

The company
So Good International is a joint venture company dedicated to the establishment of So Good as a premium dairy-alternative brand with a range of products that meet mainstream consumer needs.

Launched in 1999, the company has seen rapid growth in a UK consumer market primed for a more healthconscious food and beverage selection. Its combination of quality product and strong branding has contributed to its growth to a business of in excess of £10 million.

“We wanted an intuitive, easy-to-use system that still managed
to give the user the breadth and depth of functionality needed
moving forward. Sage 200 (formerly Sage MMS) looked clean
and simple to use, but impressed us with its functionality –
something that similarly-priced solutions could not offer.”
Allan Staples, Chief Executive Officer

The challenge
So Good had previously been outsourcing its order processing and invoicing to a third party. However, as they began to expand the company’s management quickly saw the need for greater control over its business processes such as stock and credit control. Allan Staples, CEO of So Good explains, “We wanted to further establish ourselves as a recognised supplier to the retail industry and knew that we needed to improve our relationships with our retail customers. We needed to be able to respond more quickly to their requirements. With such a high transactional workload we knew that this meant taking back control of our key business processes and finding a solution that could easily work with us in our objective.”

The solution
So Good was an existing Sage Line 50 user but needed the specific stock, sales order processing and electronic data interchange (EDI) normally only associated with much larger software systems. The company decided to remain with Sage at its core by chosing Sage MMS, a recent arrival to the Sage mid-market range of business software.

“ We wanted an intuitive, easy-to-use system that still managed to give the user the breadth and depth of functionality needed moving forward. Sage MMS looked clean and simple to use, but impressed us with its functionality – something that similarly-priced solutions could not offer.”

So Good chose to work with CPiO following a recommendation by Sage. The company felt that CPiO’s experience in implementing larger, enterprise-wide systems and its proven track record in distribution and manufacturing would be of benefit as they could support So Good in matching software and processes right across the business.

CPiO implemented a five user Sage MMS solution comprising of the full financial and commercial suite. So Good receives customer orders via an EDI link directly into Sales Order Processing. These orders are then placed on the company’s numerous warehouses using the MMS Stock Control functionality, ensuring that order fulfillment is fast, timely and accurate. Furthermore, through use of the MMS financial suite, So Good management now has access to an extensive range of management reports and easy integration with Microsoft Excel.

The benefits
So Good acknowledged that in implementing Sage MMS it was working with a fairly new product and would, therefore, face different challenges in its implementation. However, the company quickly found that by working closely with CPiO these challenges were limited and caused very little disruption to the business. “The So Good team worked alongside the CPiO team to develop the system. We decided to bring our key retail customers onto the live system one at a time to minimise the risk to the business, which was typical of the steady, pragmatic approach adopted across the implementation. And it worked. The system went live within two months.” The company quickly began to see the benefits of working with one, integrated system through access to greater functionality and improved reporting. Management is no longer reliant on information gathered from third parties and can offer rapid, timely responses to its largest retail customers.

The future
The company is now looking to expand its successful Soya health range. It is introducing new products to the market to push its distribution into Europe. Sage MMS is key to these plans and So Good is now looking to develop its use of the full functionality within the product. “We believe that we now have a solution in place that can scale and is flexible and functional enough to match our growth ambition in the future.”